Is there a technique to combine a pipeline of XSL transformations into a single transformation?

Question

I have written an application which uses a pipeline of 15 XSL stylesheets, and I\'m beginning to work on tuning its performance. It\'s designed to be portable, so that it ca

Answer 1

There is a technique that allows independent transformations to be chained together where the output of the k-th transformation is the input of the (k+1)-th transformation.

Here is a simple example:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
    xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
    xmlns:ext="http://exslt.org/common"
    exclude-result-prefixes="ext xsl">
    <xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="yes" indent="yes"/>

 <xsl:template match="node()|@*" name="identity">
     <xsl:copy>
       <xsl:apply-templates select="node()|@*"/>
     </xsl:copy>
 </xsl:template>

 <xsl:template match="/">
  <xsl:variable name="vrtfPass1">
   <xsl:apply-templates select="node()"/>
  </xsl:variable>

  <xsl:apply-templates mode="pass2"
   select="ext:node-set($vrtfPass1)/node()"/>
 </xsl:template>

 <xsl:template match="/*">
     <xsl:copy>
       <xsl:copy-of select="@*"/>
       <one/>
     <xsl:apply-templates/>
     </xsl:copy>
 </xsl:template>

 <xsl:template match="node()|@*" mode="pass2">
     <xsl:copy>
       <xsl:apply-templates select="node()|@*" mode="pass2"/>
     </xsl:copy>
 </xsl:template>

 <xsl:template match="/*/one" mode="pass2" >
     <xsl:call-template name="identity"/>
      <two/>
 </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

when this transformation is applied on the following XML document:

<doc/>

the wanted result (the first pass affffds the element <one/> as a child of the top element, then the second pass adds another child, , immediately after the element` that was created in the first pass) is produced:

<doc>
   <one/>
   <two/>
</doc>

There is a very suitable template/function in FXSL to do this: this is the compose-flist template. It takes as parameters an initial data argument and N functions (templates) and produces the chained composition of these functions/templates.

Here is the test example from the FXSL library:

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" 
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
xmlns:f="http://fxsl.sf.net/"
xmlns:myFun1="f:myFun1"
xmlns:myFun2="f:myFun2" 
xmlns:ext="http://exslt.org/common"
exclude-result-prefixes="xsl f ext myFun1 myFun2"
>
  <xsl:import href="compose.xsl"/>
  <xsl:import href="compose-flist.xsl"/>

  <!-- to be applied on any xml source -->

  <xsl:output method="text"/>
  <myFun1:myFun1/>
  <myFun2:myFun2/>


  <xsl:template match="/">

    <xsl:variable name="vFun1" select="document('')/*/myFun1:*[1]"/>
    <xsl:variable name="vFun2" select="document('')/*/myFun2:*[1]"/>
    Compose:
    (*3).(*2) 3 = 
    <xsl:call-template name="compose">
      <xsl:with-param name="pFun1" select="$vFun1"/>
      <xsl:with-param name="pFun2" select="$vFun2"/>
      <xsl:with-param name="pArg1" select="3"/>
    </xsl:call-template>

    <xsl:variable name="vrtfParam">
      <xsl:copy-of select="$vFun1"/>
      <xsl:copy-of select="$vFun2"/>
      <xsl:copy-of select="$vFun1"/>
    </xsl:variable>

    Multi Compose:
    (*3).(*2).(*3) 2 = 
    <xsl:call-template name="compose-flist">
      <xsl:with-param name="pFunList" select="ext:node-set($vrtfParam)/*"/>
      <xsl:with-param name="pArg1" select="2"/>
    </xsl:call-template>
  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template match="myFun1:*" mode="f:FXSL">
    <xsl:param name="pArg1"/>

    <xsl:value-of select="3 * $pArg1"/>
  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template match="myFun2:*" mode="f:FXSL">
    <xsl:param name="pArg1"/>

    <xsl:value-of select="2 * $pArg1"/>
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

when this transformation is applied on any xml document (not used), the wanted, correct result is produced:

Compose:
(*3).(*2) 3 = 
18

Multi Compose:
(*3).(*2).(*3) 2 = 
36

Do note: In XSLT 2.0 and later no xxx:node-set() extension is necessary, and any of the chained transformations can be contained in a real function.

Answer 2

One approach is to use modes http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt#modes but you are right that that requires transforming each step into a variable and to use a node-set extension function to be able to apply the next step to the variable contents.